Collegeboard, the corporation in charge of AP and SAT testing, announced their new guidelines for the 2021 AP tests in a brief and extremely vague instagram post: In a response to a pandemic year of learning, Collegeboard has generously offered three different exam dates from the beginning of May to the end of June. Exams are expected to be taken in schools, however, most subjects can be taken at home but all tests will be the full three and a half hours that they were in the 2019 testing year.
Exam experts like those on SuperTutorTV, a test prep youtube page, pointed out other changes in the test, one of them being that it is up to schools to decide if students will take the paper versions of the test at school or the digital version at home. However, there are some tests that Collegeboard argues are too easy to cheat on, such as language and music theory, so they must be taken on paper and in a proctored building.
When parents, teachers, and students across the country brought up the point that some districts, like SCUSD, are closed because there is a deadly pandemic raging around us, Collegeboard’s response was to find another school to take the exam at. Does Collegeboard, a corporation focused on testing high school students, not know how high schools or school districts work? If one school in the district is closed, it’s more than likely that the rest of the schools in that district will be closed too! Even if they weren’t, it’s ridiculous to assume that an entire class of AP students can just show up at another school to take their test — not every AP student can drive to another school or school district to take an exam.
In 2020, to deal with the full force of the pandemic, Collegeboard shrunk their AP tests from three hours to a 45 minute at-home-essay for most exams. For a while, I was wondering why Collegeboard couldn’t do the same thing this year. The answer, so obviously evil, is Capitalism.
Last year, schools went online halfway through March, leaving about a month and a half of time in between then and the AP tests. In 2018, Collegeboard made $1.14 billion dollars in revenue through school districts and parents paying SAT and AP test fees, despite calling themselves a “non-profit” organization. Of course, they were afraid that last year, distressed students would cancel their tests, meaning they wouldn’t be able to make the large sums of money they usually did. So, to encourage test taking, they shrunk the tests to the 45 minute essays.
Then, when students were rushedly trying to submit tests, the Collegeboard website kept crashing or wouldn’t allow students to end their test, marking them late and incomplete. After that absolute nightmare, the website crashed again and took forever to return scores to students.
Instead of investing their billions of dollars into website design or anti-cheating software, Collegeboard has apparently decided to turn logic on its head, telling all of us, “We totally know that you haven’t been in school for like a year now, but come in and take our standardized test so we can get money!”
We’ve lost a whole year of in person instruction time, so why are we trying to pretend like we can take all these standardized tests? Why is Collegeboard valuing money over our education? Most importantly, why are colleges letting them?
Colleges are the only ones that can hold corporations like Collegeboard accountable and they are not doing that — if anything, they’re just making the problem worse. For the class of 2022 and 2023, colleges have generally not made up their minds about what is required of prospective students. One of the biggest confusions about college applications is SAT and AP scores. More and more colleges have decided that they will be test-optional, or even test-blind, arguing that tests will have no weight in college admission decisions.
For years, students have been told over and over to practice academic integrity and punished when they don’t. However, academic integrity should be a two-way street. Colleges don’t really know what they’re looking for from the classes of 22 and 23, which leaves students clueless in the meantime.